1. Where did we come from? A question that has intrigued humanity since time immemorial. Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species addressed the question in supremely controversial fashion by proposing, among other things, that man evolved from apes.

2. The theological uproar continues today, notably in the United States, with creationists promoting the notion of intelligent design, while attempting to refute evolutionary theory and prevent coverage of the topic in schools.

3. Proof that humans were related to apes, chimps-off-the-old-block as it were, comes from a number of mostly fragmentary fossils discovered, by and large in Africa and Europe, by palaeontologists and anthropologists.

4. The drawback in Darwin's scheme was that there was a gap in the fossil record - a missing primate - positioned somewhere on the evolutionary scale between early apes and hominids, the name given to all members of the family of humans.

5. The absence leaves two competing solutions to the evolutionary monkey puzzle: the Out of Africa theorists who argue that modern man emerged in and then migrated from Africa, and the multiregionalists who believe that this process took place in different parts of the world.

6. The most recent discovery is Ardiphithecus Ramidus, said to be the closest thing know to the link. It lived 4.5 million years ago where Ethiopia is now and would have looked a lot like a chimp. What marked it out is that it walked on two feet and had more human-like teeth than its contemporaries.

7. The search for evidence of humanity's origins has featured some remarkable monkey business. The discovery on British soil of Piltdown Man, which appeared to conclusively prove Darwin right, is one of the most infamous hoaxes of all time. The marriage of a centuries-old woman and an orang-utan, while not as unsavoury as it sounds, demonstrated the ability of fraudsters to take the scientific community for a ride.

8. The findings of self-taught Japanese archaeologist Shinichi Fujimara, reverentially dubbed "God's Hand" because of his ability to discover ancient human fossils, challenged the orthodoxy of established theories in the 1980s and 90s with evidence that the earliest humans had lived in Japan. Newspaper photographs of Fujimara planting ancient relics in prehistoric earth showed that it was his hands, rather than those of a divine being, as well as gullible scientists, that were responsible for his astounding hypothesis.

9. Creationist scientists have a multitude of problems with the "missing link" evidence presented by evolutionist scientists. Believing the creation story from Genesis, they maintain that evidence for the "missing link" is either fraudulent or inconclusive and believe man to be created in the image of God.

10. Speculative visions of man's ancestry in popular culture have conjured up different images of our forefathers. Planet of the Apes presented a dystopian vision of a futuristic earth ruled by primates. Alternatively,
The Flintstones animated the modern stone-age family and satirised 60s suburban America.